Californians Consider a Future Without a Nuclear Plant for a Neighbor

The San Onofre nuclear plant, south of San Clemente, Calif., will be closed permanently, a process that might take a decade.Credit
Gregory Bull/Associated Press

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Residents of this quiet Orange County beach community often all but forgot about the hulking nuclear plant just south of the city limits.

But reminders, while infrequent, were jarring. The governor’s office mailed residents potassium iodide pills, to take in case of a radioactive leak. Emergency sirens occasionally sounded in the middle of the night (false alarms, residents were told). And anyone who drove south out of town was confronted with the plant’s looming twin domes.

But after nearly half a century living with a radioactive neighbor, San Clemente is now adjusting to a future without the San Onofre nuclear power plant, whose proximity has long shaped life here in ways big and small.

Last month, Southern California Edison announced that the nuclear plant, which was closed in January 2012 when a problem with its new steam generators led to a small leak of radioactive steam, would shut down for good.

Worries about radiation poisoning, which increased here after the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, have suddenly been supplanted by more mundane concerns, like how much the cost of electricity will go up.

“For most residents, I think San Onofre was out of sight, out of mind,” Tim Brown, a San Clemente city councilman, said. “They took the power it generated for granted. Now that it’s gone, well, we’ll see how much it really does affect our lives.

“I anticipate it’s going to be tough for some folks,” he continued. “The plant was a large employer in town. It brought a lot of money and activity to our city. And the new normal is going to be ever-increasing power rates.”

As more of the aging nuclear reactors around the country are closed — four reactors, including the two at San Onofre, have been retired this year — more communities around the country may soon find themselves in circumstances similar to San Clemente’s. The dismantling of San Onofre’s reactors will be among the largest decommissioning of nuclear power plants in the country. Experts say it will likely take at least a decade.

But the effects of the plant’s closing are already reverberating. By September, Southern California Edison will reduce its staff at the plant to 600 employees from 1,500. Electricity prices have increased since the plant, which is about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego and powered 1.4 million homes, went offline last year.

Last week, when the power went out at Lily Tally’s home in San Clemente, she worried that erratic electricity service — especially in the summer, when demand for power is highest — would become more common. She said she and her husband were now planning to put solar panels on their house.

Still, she said she was relieved that San Onofre was closing. Interstate 5, the only road out of town, runs beside the plant’s trademark twin domes. So Ms. Tally and her husband kept their S.U.V. ready in case they needed a different escape route. They planned to drive with their two young sons through the nature preserve east of town.

“It was always in the back of my mind, especially with the earthquakes here,” Ms. Tally, 35, said. “Safety-wise, I do feel better now. But then there’s the ambivalence about having other sources of power that will cost more.”

The rising cost of power is not the only concern for local businesses. In the non-summer months, seasonal plant workers often made up about 30 percent of the guests at some San Clemente hotels, although that number has dwindled since last year.

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Nancy Hunt, a local real estate broker, said consultants, who would work at the nuclear plant for months at a time, also accounted for a large portion of the renters in town.

“The workers rent in our community. They go to the beauty shops here. They go to the restaurants,” Ms. Hunt said. “We will miss them.”

San Onofre’s first reactor began operating in 1968, and Units 2 and 3 followed in the early 1980s. Unit 1 was shuttered in 1992.

Back then, Southern California Edison was recruiting local engineering students like John Mourer to work at the nuclear plant. The company paid for him to finish college, and he began working at the plant in 1985.

But today, attitudes toward nuclear energy in California are different. State law bans the permitting of new nuclear facilities until the federal government built a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste, which effectively amounts to a moratorium on new plants. The only other nuclear plant in the state, Diablo Canyon on the Central Coast, has also been operating since the 1980s.

Now 50, after working at San Onofre more than half his life, Mr. Mourer is looking for work as far afield as Abu Dhabi, and debating whether to bring his four children with him.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, a lot of us have,” Mr. Mourer said. “But there are not a lot of other nuclear plants in California.”

This week, the last of the nuclear fuel was removed from San Onofre’s reactors. Activists hope the state will soon be free of nuclear power. But the nuclear waste, which still remains at San Onofre, continues to concern local officials. And the federal government is no closer to establishing a national storage facility for nuclear waste than it was when San Onofre’s reactors were built.

“We still have the nuclear waste issue to address,” said Lori Donchak, a San Clemente city councilwoman. “This is not an issue unique to San Clemente. This is a national issue. The waste needs to go somewhere where it will be permanently taken care of.”

While the nuclear waste remains on-site and the plant is being decommissioned, the emergency sirens will stay in San Clemente. But for many residents, just the knowledge that the plant is no longer splitting atoms has already offered some peace of mind. Over the years, many had turned to gallows humor to quell their fears, guessing the number of limbs they would come out of the water with if they surfed near San Onofre, or joking that the plant’s twin domes looked like a monument to Dolly Parton.

Chryssa Atkinson, 51, the mother of two teenagers, said her son liked to surf near San Onofre. Like many other surfers, he insisted the water — which the nuclear plant used to cool the reactors — was warmer than at nearby beaches.

“I was not a fan,” Ms. Atkinson said. “I’d tell him, ‘Yes, the water is warmer, but you didn’t have that tail before you went in.’ ”

But now, for the first time, she doesn’t mind her children surfing near the power plant. “Now that it’s closed, I tell them, ‘Sure, go for it.’ ”

Correction: July 30, 2013

An article on Friday about the closing of the San Onofre nuclear power plant, south of San Clemente, Calif., misstated the given name of a councilwoman there. She is Lori Donchak, not Linda.

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2013, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Californians Consider a Future Without a Nuclear Plant for a Neighbor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe